Published 4:00 am, Sunday, January 27, 2002

Remember this name: Michelle Richmond. It takes impressive talent and emotional range to trump the disappointments of "The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress," an at times mesmerizing, at times maddening collection of stories. This is a young writer whose future progression should be exhilarating to watch.

Richmond writes with grace and calm and a refreshing sense of playfulness, even in the midst of dreary material. Her characters live and breathe; we feel them, and feel them feeling each other, especially when she's writing about the four sisters who pop up throughout this collection, often facing girlhood together in the South under what are usually uneasy circumstances.

She has insights that seem like insights worth having and can bring a scene alive economically, as when she describes a character greeting someone in a cafe. She "fidgets with her watchband and looks around the room, as if she might find someone more interesting in the crowd."

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Too bad, then, that the stories are a mixed bag. Half are short-shorts, interspersed with the others, which sets an unfortunate tone of disjointedness and effect-for-effect's sake. Like one-night stands, short-shorts tend not to be satisfying: either forgettable or memorable, but only in a way that teases you with its brevity. Some of the longer stories, too, just do not quite fit with the others chosen for the collection.

Maybe a good way to think of this book is like the diaphanous white dress of the title story, which slips off a woman standing on a footbridge over Market St., leaving her exposed to the elements. The story in which the dress soars never does justice to the bold image around which it's built. But hey, it's a great dress, and it takes an alert eye even to see it up there, beautiful and haunting. Maybe that's enough.

'Palladio" is a disappointingly uninvolving interweaving of modern romance and modern commerce. The novel alternately sketches the inner life of adman John Wheelwright, a dreamer whose career advances have left him with the suspicion that he is little more than "an instrument of what seemed like a vast and powerful blankness," and the emotionally stunted youth of Molly Howe, whose boundless withdrawal obsesses John after the brief post-Berkeley affair that Molly terminates by simply disappearing after returning to her upstate New York home.

A decade later, John escapes creative stagnation in Manhattan when he is asked to join an arrogantly uncommercial agency by reclusive guru Mal Osbourne,

who lavishes funds on conceptual artists to create anti-ads and is given to such pronouncements as "we have proven that advertising can communicate something greater than the fables of envy and lust and instant gratification that form the whole worn fabric of Western life." When Molly shows up, coincidentally, on the arm of a snide filmmaker eager to dismantle Osbourne's mystique, sparks fly, both figuratively and literally.

Despite patches of lovely unforced prose and keen glimpses into both teenage-girl and adult-male hungers, Dee hovers too reticently outside his twin protagonists to make their emotional lives resonate. Nor does he establish sufficient critical perspective to differentiate his observations about media saturation from those of any other smart young thing bursting with Pointed Remarks. The result feels both polished and inconsequential -- a highly worked frame without enough inside.

Parzival's name, meaning "to pierce through the middle," was chosen by his father as an incentive for him "to seek the middle way." But despite this precaution, Parzival's journey from a fool's state to realms of wisdom reveals a hero more wishy-washy than prudent for much of the trip. Indeed, the plot of "Parzival and the Stone From Heaven" is centered on his misguided quest for knighthood, while he remains oblivious to his identity as heir to the mysterious Christian relic known as the Grail.

The nice touch, however, is that Lindsay Clarke, like a modern descendant of medieval bards Chretien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach, does tread an admirable middle path in retelling the tale. It would be flippantly unfair to place him dead center between the versions by Monty Pythorn and Richard Wagner,

although Clarke alludes to them as modernizers of the story at opposite poles.

Clarke is a classic storyteller whose prose has an almost childlike elegance, with a few patches of clumsiness, making "Parzival" a charming modern fable for teenagers and adults. New Age editorializing does intrude occasionally, particularly when Parzival's hermit-mentor Trevrizent overdoes the therapist routine and nearly spoils our experience of Parzival's reclusive epiphany. But in general such Jungian analyses are left to the preface and afterword; and Parzival, Gawain, the Proud Lady and others come alive as psychologically convincing people rather than archetypes. Depictions of battles between the sexes and early contacts between Muslims and Christians help make this "Parzival" an engrossing historical romance.

Most people looking to buy a television before World War II had never seen a single program. Still they lined up at Macy's and added their names to long waiting lists in order to own a $350 10-inch set: Marvelous TV seemed to sell itself.

By the early '50s, it was also selling everything else, from Cadillacs to Carnation Milk, in advertising seamlessly sewn into shows starring Milton Berle, Jack Benny and Henry Fonda. In "Brought to You By," Lawrence R. Samuel expertly recounts the early history of television advertising in relation to the broader evolution of broadcasting, vividly illustrating the co-dependency of stations and sponsors that shaped everything from the timing of sporting events to the coming of reruns.

More significant, Samuel offers an original and intelligent perspective on the franchising of the American Dream underlying our consumer culture to this day. "Television shows were conceived not as entertainment during which to advertise, but rather as advertising vehicles offering entertainment," he observes. "Driven by this fluid interchange between entertainment and consumerism, postwar America became a place in which it was difficult to say where leisure ended and consumption began."

Emerging from the Great Depression and a war in which waste was unpatriotic,

the United States made an about-face in the '50s almost incomprehensible in speed and scope. "Brought to You By" tells the astounding story of how commercial TV, supported by government and encouraged by the public, made Schweppes Tonic Water "famous the world over," Chevrolet "Motorific" and conspicuous consumption the badge of good citizenship.

-- Jonathon Keats

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